compute

September 10, 2009

Based on recent announcements from Oracle, they are at least trying to dispel doubts over their intentions for the Sun hardware business, and poking a finger in IBM’s eye while they are it. This is a welcome sign from Oracle, especially with the additional doubts created by the EU decision to review the merger (see here), a solid statement of intent was increasingly critical to prevent continued hemorrhaging of Sun’s hardware business. The first ad (see below) can be found here,

On the face of it, this is a pretty clear statement of intent and I hope they mean it. But, I’m left wondering how they intend to make good on these promises and still make decent money on SPARC hardware.

The second ad is more direct competitive statement related to IBM’s DB2 business (see here), something that used to be a Sun stronghold.

Today, the king-of-the-hill for a single system database benchmark (TPC/C) is IBM hitting 6,085,166 tpmC, but Oracle seems to be implying that their result will be greater than 10,000,000 tpmC. The question is, will this be an apples to apples comparison of two single boxes or will this be a cluster to single box comparison? My guess is that Sun doesn’t have a single system capable of a result of this magnitude which leaves them with using a clustered version of Oracle for the benchmark.Whatever the case, it should be interesting to see how they do and what hardware they use. Anyway, I’m looking forward to October 14th to see just what they have to say.

The EU eventually approves the deal, meanwhile Sun has been left twisting in the wind for the best part of a year, as it’s competitors steal one customer after another. IN just the past two quarters, Sun’s revenues have dropped 30% and 37% respectively which is little short of disastrous.

The EU rejects the merger (and they’ve done that before, just ask GE). A rejection would leave Sun in an untenable position, it’s been hemorrhaging market share over the last few months, and it’s value to possible suitors such as HP would be dramatically reduced by a failed Oracle merger.

The EU places conditions on the merger such as preventing Oracle from acquiring key software assets from Sun such as MySQL. Since it was the software that Oracle was after in the first place, this might make the whole deal unattractive to Oracle.

At best, this puts an ever bigger question mark over Sun’s future which can’t be good for their customers. So, whatever the final merits of the deal, I’m inclined to agree with Macbeth, “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly.”

Dependency on NVIDIA GPU in the server. This point raised some questions: Servers don't do graphics, and to save $ - they don't include higher-end GPUs. Most include just a simple graphics chip on the motherboard. Since I'm at VMworld and had the opportunity to visit with Independent Hardware Vendors - I went to find out. Here's the answers I got from HP and Dell:

HP: HP will support you if you install an NVIDIA GPU adapter (PCIe) into a DL160 or DL165 rackmount 1U server only. While you can put an NVIDIA GPU in other HP rack mount server products, and it would most likely work, the company won't support you. That being said, however, HP will direct you to their workstation blade product line - a product specifically built for desktop virtualization purposes. Each blade in the workstation blade chassis includes an NVIDIA GPU pre-installed on a mezzanine board. But realize that for graphics intensive solutions, you are stuck to a 1:1 consolidation ratio of desktop to blade without virtualization as the GPU has yet to be virtualized by any hardware (I can suspect we will see this technology in the near future as the demand for desktop virtualization grows).

Dell: Dell is definitely behind the game here. Dell currently does not offer any rack or blade servers specifically designed for desktop virtualization - that include a GPU. The guys in the Dell booth at VMworld did tell me that they have a third party systems integrator that takes Dell blade products, adds the necessary GPU hardware and software and sells those to desktop virtualization customers, but the end product is supported by the partner and not Dell. The guys in the booth couldn't remember the name of the partner and 15 minutes of Googling didn't turn up any leads either.

Needless to say, the choices are indicative of a market in its infancy with HP in a clear lead. The next big step will be GPU virtualization.

August 26, 2009

Last month, I blogged about HP’s recent announcement of SPECpower benchmark results for blade servers (see here). If you don’t have time to go back and read the original post, the gist of it was that there was very little difference in power efficiency between HP’s blades and their rack-mount servers which contradicts one of the key marketing messages for blades.

Needless to say, HP’s blade marketing team were concerned and promised to investigate further, which they did. As it turns out, the benchmarking team at HP were very aggressive in optimizing power consumption for the rack-mount system, optimizations included:

Power Supplies

The rack-mount system was configured with a single power supply, rather than a redundant configuration which is more popular with customers. This has a major impact on power efficiency, because redundant power supplies share the load, so the maximum utilization on a power supply in a dual configuration is never going to be greater than 50%.

The problem arises because of the way SPECpower benchmark works, generating a series of workloads, some of which barely register on a modern server. With these loads, power consumption on a single power supply can easily drop into the 25-30% range (i.e. if it’s a 500 watt power supply it could draw as little as 125-150 watts). With a dual power supply system, the load on each supply would drop into 12.5-15% range which is very bad for power supply efficiency. Modern power supplies under loads from 20-100% are very efficient, typically in the 90% or better range, but efficiency drops very steeply once you fall below 20% utilization. It’s this loss of efficiency that HP was trying to avoid on the rack-mount server by only equipping it with a single power supply.

Network Interfaces

The way the SPECpower benchmark is written allows for unnecessary features like network interfaces (yes, I know you have lots of servers with no network interfaces) to be turned off in the benchmark.

Different Benchmark Settings

Despite the fact that the blade and the rack-mount server were identical from a hardware perspective, the settings used for the benchmark varied widely between the systems. For example, different JVM command-line optimization and heap allocations were used for the rack-mount and blade server runs of the benchmark.

So while the numbers appear to be “apples-to-apples” in reality the rack-mount result represents artificially high power efficiency that you probably will not see in the real world.

The net result is that the SPECpower benchmark is of little use when comparing power efficiency between different server types and configurations because the vendors can run non-standard configurations, make optimizations that would never occur in the real world, and are not consistent about the way they run the benchmark from one result to the next, even between two benchmarks results from the same company!

August 14, 2009

According to a report in “The Register” last week (see here) Sun has it’s very own “Cash for Clunkers” stimulus program, offering discounts to anybody looking for some new SPARC hardware. For example if you trade-in qualifying hardware for a Enterprise M8000 or M9000 system they’ll throw in a free chassis, which is big bucks these days.

At our Catalyst 2009 conference in July we had an informal meeting with Burton Group clients to discuss the Sun/Oracle merger and it’s impact on their plans. Roughly half of the customers at the meeting had either already started, or were going to start efforts to move away from the SPARC hardware platform. Attractive as these deals are, the question Sun customers have to ask is whether to put any more money into the SPARC platform until Oracle clarifies its future. I think the answer to this question depends on how far a company is down the road to replacing SPARC, and the age of their existing SPARC hardware. My bet is that companies fall into several categories:

Old hardware/a long way from replacing SPARC/no plans to replace SPARC: For these customers, the deals make a lot of sense. The old hardware will be going up in terms of maintenance costs (and that was true even before we had the prospect of Oracle looking at hardware maintenance pricing). Any effort to migrate is going to take time to plan and execute, so going through one more hardware cycle with Sun probably makes sense.

Old hardware/advanced plans to replace SPARC: If you are well down the road to replacing SPARC, then it doesn’t make sense to commit to another generation of SPARC hardware,no matter how good the deal is.

Middle-aged hardware: The decision here really depends on your faith in Oracle’s plans for SPARC hardware. If you fear that SPARC may die in the next couple of years then it may be worth considering an early upgrade to give you more time to plan a migration.

New hardware: It doesn’t make sense to replace hardware purchased recently, but if you’ve bought in the last few months it maybe worth trying to get the rebates retroactively.

What customers really need right now is clarification from Oracle on just what the future holds for SPARC server platforms with some firm roadmaps and product support commitments. Without that clarification, I doubt that any rebate/discount program is really going to persuade many SPARC customers to spend money on new SPARC hardware at this time.

PS: Sun is offering similar deals to anybody replacing IBM or HP servers, but I doubt they’ll get many takers for that!

For Windows Server customers, the key improvements in 2008 R2 are in the Hyper-V hypervisor. If Hyper-V doesn’t matter to you, then you’ll have to make do with improvements in the PowerShell scripting environment, better power management to reduce server power consumption, a new web server, and support for .NET on the stripped down Windows Core installation.

The other big feature of 2008 R2 is close integration with Windows 7 to provide such things as the ability to access internal resources without a VPN, improvement to remote and virtual desktop support, improved caching of data for users in remote offices, federated search, and BitLocker improvement for encrypting data on laptop on desktop systems.

Moving on to Windows 7, Microsoft (and the rest of the PC industry) is hoping that the release of Windows 7 will kick-start desktop operating system upgrades and accompanying desktop/laptop hardware purchases. If the reports last week of 40% of enterprises adopting Windows 7 within 14 months of release date, then Microsoft and the rest of the PC industry will be ecstatic. Just to put that 40% in perspective, according to Forester, Vista is stuck at 12.5"% after 28 months.

The killer Windows 7 feature for many enterprise IT organizations is the full virtual copy of Windows XP which is there to help with applications that don’t run on Windows 7. This feature will have one side effect on the enterprise desktop; it will drive the adoption of 64-bit Windows , because the virtual XP feature isn’t supported on the 32-bit version of Windows 7, and that’s good news for PC vendors looking for a boost to desktop and laptop sales.

July 21, 2009

HP has just published SPECpower_ssj2008 results for a c7000 blade system, the results when compared to existing rack mount server results for the same benchmark make interesting reading. Before I say anything else, kudos to HP for publishing a power benchmark on blades, now if we can only get IBM, Dell, Cisco etc to follow suit.

The blade system used sixteen identically configured blades to achieve the following result:

ssj_ops @ 100%

avg. watts @ 100%

avg. watts @ idle

ssj_ops/watt

7,210,418

2,783

802

1,877

Each of the 16 blades used a pair of Intel Xeon 5520 processors and 8 GBs of memory. The result is interesting because HP just happens to have published results for an identically configured Proliant DL 380 G6 rack mount server. I’ve multiplied the rack mount result by 16 so we can directly compare power efficiency:

ssj_ops @ 100%

avg. watts @ 100%

avg. watts @ idle

ssj_ops/watt

7,037,296

2,720

1060.8

1,813

From these results we can draw some useful conclusions:

There is a difference of roughly 3.5% for performance/watt, with blades holding the advantage.

Idle power consumption for the blade solution is approximately 25% lower

Peak power consumption for the rack mount solution is approximately 2% lower

Assuming both systems are kept 100% busy 24x7x365, and power is $0.095 kW-hour, then the power costs for the rack mount solution would be $52 cheaper on an annual basis. Assuming the systems are 50% idle, the blades would have $44 dollar annual savings on power. So it looks like power consumption (at least based on these results) shouldn’t be a significant factor if you are trying to decide between blades and rack mount servers.

As you might expect, the compute model is similar to EC2 in that the pricing is "per hour" and per GB. The missing part in the model is the size (or type in EC2 terms) of the compute platform. I would expect Microsoft to augment pricing for compute based-on the amount of compute resources an application requires. I don't think Microsoft would allow an applications that requires 5x the amount of memory or CPU time to be the same price as another application with lesser requirements. There must be tiers at some point. Nothing is infinitely scalable.

Transactions, which I think will translate to I/O, are similar as well -- although Amazon is cheaper (more I/O per cost). The SQL and .NET services are different, as to be expected, since Azure is more of a full featured PaaS.

What I found interesting was this statement:

While consumption based pricing provides great flexibility we have also heard it introduces a level of unpredictability and some customers prefer other options. At launch we will share details of subscription offers that provide payment predictability and price discounts that reflect levels of usage commitment.

Burton Group has been saying that we believe that IT organizations need more predictable cloud costs. Some organizations have no idea how much cloud services they are consuming until the bills start to trickle in. IT governance will demand that predictable cost controls be put in place. An "all you can eat within limits" model seems to fit the bill. This could be a good move by Microsoft.

If I had one piece of advice for Microsoft it would be regarding this statement:

To support partners’ and customers’ complex business needs we are providing an enterprise-class guarantee backed by a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability.

Microsoft, please do these things regarding the SLAs:

Be exhaustive. Don't insult our intelligence with a 1 page SLA. SLAs need to cover more areas than three areas. Things like contingencies, abatements, and service response, need to be covered too.

Build in some flexibility. An enterprise-class guarantee requires some flexibility. One-size boilerplate SLAs do not fit all.

Make a machine readable, XML SLA format, complete with the ability to sign and negotiate programmatically. Doing so will speed up automation.

June 11, 2009

In my previous post on this topic I promised to take a look at how a more “vertically integrated” set of IT suppliers might change things. In this post we’ll look at the challenges faced by a combination of Oracle and Sun.

The first challenge that any company will face is that a modern IT organization is orders of magnitude more complex and diverse than in era when IBM ruled the data center. For example, most IT organizations today run tens or even hundreds of applications from a wide variety of vendors on a diverse set hardware. That’s a far cry from the IBM era when an organization might have one or two computers and a handful of applications. So the big question is whether true vertical integration all the way up the hardware and software stack for the entire enterprise is even possible today. I’m inclined to think not, because even Oracle only has a handful of the applications needed by a modern enterprise

So if full vertical integration isn’t an option, the key questions are “how far up the stack can Oracle go?” and “does the convenience of vertical integration for part of the IT environment offset the issues of vendor lock-in and higher upfront purchase costs?”

The answer to the first question is that Oracle could offer a well integrated stack for Oracle databases and any applications from Oracle that live on top of that Oracle database. Using Sun’s hardware and operating system (along with OEM products like the Hitachi Data Systems enterprise arrays) they have access to a complete suite of enterprise hardware and system software. The problem is that much of that hardware is not widely used in the enterprise and many IT organizations have long since made the choice of another supplier, so Oracle has to persuade them to rip-n-replace a significant chunk of their infrastructure in order to benefit from integrated Oracle solutions.

The answer to the second question will depend a great deal on the previous choices made by an IT organization. For example an IT organization running Oracle on Sun hardware using Sun storage products may find the idea of tighter integration quite attractive. On the other hand an organization using HP servers and EMC storage to underpin it’s Oracle applications may not be interested at all.

An area of particular concern is the hypervisor, given Oracle’s recent acquisitions, it’s clear that they want to be a player in the server virtualization world. The problem is that many large enterprises are already deploying VMware ESX and to a lesser degree Microsoft HyperV and Citrix XenServer along with a suite of tools to manage the virtual environment. If Oracle fails to displace these products and becomes a “virtualization island” with it’s own set of management tools, then much of the vertical integration advantage disappears, as IT organizations are forced to work with two sets of tools, one for Oracle solutions and one for everything else.

June 03, 2009

When Cisco launched it’s UCS blade system in March, they were adamant that they did not plan to get into the rack mount server business. As I pointed out at the time (see here) the lack of rack mount servers would be a significant barrier to entry in the Enterprise because:

Many customers are still wary of the vendor lock-in, limited scalability, and pricey nature of blades and continue to buy rack mount servers in large quantities.

IT organizations try to keep the number of hardware companies they deal with to a minimum in order to maximize their buying power and simplify support for the server infrastructure. Telling companies to buy blades from Cisco and rack mounts from another supplier is not likely to fly with many customers.

So guess what, today Cisco announced a range of 1U and 2U rack mount servers designed to complement the USC blade systems. I suspect that this is the result of early feedback from potential resellers and end users, i.e. “if you want to be taken seriously, then you have to bring more than blades to the data center gunfight.” Given the short timeframe between this launch and the March UCS announcements, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Cisco always had a contingency plan here, and just hoped they wouldn’t need it.

The range of servers is still limited compared to the major server vendors, but 1U and 2U dual processor systems are certainly the sweet spot of the market, and should help the get a foot in the door at many enterprise IT organizations. Of course, this is all moot until Cisco actually has general availability on USC and its rack mount cousins, at the moment they seem to be as rare as rocking horse droppings outside of Cisco data centers!